Site Festival dates: 1st-31st May 2012

The Site Festival is a contemporary arts festival, which aims to showcase artist-led projects with a full and exciting programme of visual arts, performance, music, screenings, open studios, artist talks and workshops.

Darren Almond
Sometimes Still

5th-10th May 2012

Brunel Goods Shed, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 3AP

SVA, the Site Festival host organisation, is pleased to announce that the opening exhibition will be Sometimes Still by Darren Almond and supported by Darbyshire and White Cube as part of this year’s festival.

Sometimes Still is an imposing six-screen high-definition video Darren Almond photographed near Kyoto, Japan, over several years, and this will be its first showing in the UK. Almond and his camera accompany a Tendai novitiate monk during a nightly marathon, part of the novitiate’s broader engagement with the Buddhist process of Kaihogyo the feat of physical and mental endurance by which these monks attempt to reach a state of enlightenment. This ritual is devised to be an extreme example of a “limit-experience”, involving a precarious sounding of the boundary between life and death in order to promote a concentrated, intense experience of body and time. Commitment that takes physical and psychological endurance to the limit has always interested Darren Almond, and is a fundamental element of his films and of his artwork. 

The 25 minutes of film show the monk leaving the temple and hurrying through the night, crossing roads or passing underneath by means of underpasses and ultimately returning to the temple at dawn. The camera gradually looses the protagonist from its focus. The run through the undergrowth is staged in such a way that the viewer feels as though he is actually the person doing the running. The soundtrack, comprising the resonant thudding of the monk’s slightly decelerated heartbeat, also boosts our engagement with the unfolding visual aspect. In addition to the main projection screen, the four supplementary screens sometimes show the same scene as the main screen, but more often show what the monk sees. These screens have, however, been treated and handled in different ways. Frequent appearances of negative images create a strange, wanly lit and immeasurable spatial depth. The loop ends with the vision of the “Marathon Monk”, having endured his nocturnal trials, blessing the city of Kyoto deep in the valley, swathed in the dawn mist. 

This year’s Site Festival will feature curated works, screenings, performances and talks by Andrew Kotting, Negative Space, Ben Rivers, Mezz, Lux, Aleksandra Mir, Brickhouse, The Performance Exchange Minima, Stand and Stare, tactileBOSCH, CAZ project space, ]performance s p a c e [ Bristol Diving School, Keith Allen, Eyebrow, Kathy Hinde, Simon Munnery, John Hegley and Get the Blessing.

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